Reader-response criticism Flashcards
Reception theory
The altering responses of the general public over time.
Meaning is a set of implicit potentialities which become manifest only as realized by the cumulative responses of readers over time.
Reader-response criticism
Focuses on ongoing mental operations of readers. Meanings are a production of the reader.
Indeterminate elements
Subjective gaps ina. text that the readers fills through creative participation (Iser)
Implied reader
Is established by text as someone expected to respond in a certain way to ‘response-inviting structures’
Actual reader
Responses colored by private experiences
According to Iser, are all reader interpretations valid?
No, authorial intention limits reader’s creative additions, which means some interpretations can be rejected as misreadings.
French structuralist criticism
Literary conventions (when assimilated by competent reader) structure reading and impose constraints on the partially creative process of interpretation
How did Barthes view authorial intention?
Irrelevent, to impose an author, is to limit a text. Writing, according to Barthes, does not originate from a single fixed source, but is unfinished until it’s read. Every reading writes the text anew, because every reader interprets it differently and therefore there is an endless mixture of potential meanings
Describe the deconstructionist view of reader-response
A text is a play of differences that generates innumerable, mutually contradictory meanings.
Describe Norman Holland’s Freudian take on reader-response
Meaning is an interplay between the author’s unconscious needs, drives, defenses, fantasies and the reader’s own unconscious.
Describe Stanley Fish’s take on reader-response
Affective stylistics: we make sense of a text by anticipation, which is sometimes fulfilled and sometimes disappointed. These mistakes in anticipation become part of the experience provided by language and so are an integral part of the texts meaning.
Interpretative communities
Members share a reading strategy or set of assumptions . As each strategy creates seemingly objective features there is no universal ‘right reading’ of any text.
Affective fallacy
The error of evaluating a poem by its effects upon the reader, which causes the poem to disappear, the criticism ending in impressionism and relativism.
Leading to call for objective criticism - instead of describing effects, should focus on features, devices and form.
